Biography

John Kulp, PhD’s background is in the field of bioorganic chemistry with specialization in protein nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) structure determination, computational methods for studying protein structure, synthetic peptide chemistry and computer-aided drug design with a focus on computational fragment-based methods. During his PhD, Dr. Kulp’s work centered on stabilizing alpha-helical peptides for development as a new class of drug molecules and using NMR to study peptide structure in solution and on solid surfaces. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory, he developed peptide nanopores as stochastic sensing elements and patented a new class of beta-helical peptide architectures.

Dr. Kulp left the Navy in 2010 to follow his research interests in therapeutic discovery. He joined BioLeap, a small business with a proprietary fragment-based computational chemistry software platform that specialized in the study of protein-protein interactions. Dr. Kulp participated in the development of novel inhibitors for DHFR, PCSK9, 11b-HSD and recA. From 2013 to 2014, Dr. Kulp was the project leader for BioLeap’s PCSK9 program, which consisted of modeling (BioLeap), assays (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard) and chemical synthesis (WuXi and BioDuro). During that time, he integrated molecular dynamics and docking software into BioLeap’s fragment-based discovery platform.

In 2014, Dr. Kulp founded Conifer Point Pharmaceuticals as a computational consulting company to help accelerate medicinal chemistry projects by increasing customer success in: hit identification, lead optimization, acquiring grant awards, attracting investment funding and attracting licensing or collaboration opportunities.

Dr. Kulp joined the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute, the Hepatitis B Foundation’s research arm, in 2013 as an assistant professor. He still maintains an active research lab that focuses on identifying and characterizing novel treatments for hepatitis B and liver cancer. In 2015, Dr. Kulp took on the additional role of director of academic affairs at the Blumberg Institute. Dr. Kulp oversees educational training at the institute, including high school programs, college internships, MS and PhD degrees, post-doctoral training and doctor of medicine education. Notably, Dr. Kulp coordinates the partnership between the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine’s Master of Biomedical Science (MBS) program and the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute.

Student research opportunities

Screening a collection of small molecules for hepatitis B surface antigen and cccDNA inhibitors using alphaLISA and ELISA assay, validating and studying the mechanism of action of potent, nontoxic compounds that appear to target hepatitis B virus